As the cost of medical care rises, providing in-home elderly care from caregivers who are required to make frequent house visits to an elderly or other patient may become prohibitively expensive. Remote care has thus become an important mode of patient care. It allows one caregiver to manage a large number of patients spread across a large geographic area.
Remote care, however, may still lack the resources to provide around-the-clock monitoring by remote caregivers of elderly patients. Such constant monitoring may also be regarded as intrusive. Rather than constantly monitor patients for conditions in which they might require assistance, some remote care systems instead attempt to predict when a patient requires assistance and dispatch assistance only when the systems infer that it is needed. The prediction or inference algorithms may be imperfect, however, and may dispatch assistance when it is unneeded or fail to detect a need for assistance.
Some remote care systems have relied on users to request assistance, such as through pushing a call button, which may generate a signal that is transmitted through a network to a remote caregiver. However, patients with declining cognitive abilities, such as those suffering from Alzheimer's Disease, may have difficulty remembering what they are doing and whether that activity or condition requires assistance. Such patients may also fail to recall how to request assistance. A responsive remote care system for patients with declining cognitive abilities is needed.